David Blaine: No stunt in my show is a guarantee

He has lived trapped underwater for days, caught bullets in his mouth, and encased himself in a block of ice.

And yet, world-renowned magician and stunt artist David Blaine maintains that his upcoming tour, which will visit Seattle’s Paramount Theatre on May 16, may be his toughest feat yet.

Blaine told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show that his touring show combines the best of his old and magic new tricks, along with plenty of endurance stunts. But because of the element of the unknown, Blaine said that there are no guarantees that every stunt will go perfectly according to script.

“It makes for a show that any night anything can happen, anything can go wrong, it’s not a prepackaged idea, and it’s not an illusion show,” he said. “What you’re seeing is night after night, an event with a bunch of endurance feats where anything could stop the show.”

And because the taxing show repeats each night, Blaine said, that the touring show is harder than any single one of the endurance feats that made him famous.

“There is an unknown in every single night – it’s exciting,” he said. “It’s fun for me night after night. But it is very difficult physically.”

One of the stunts in his new show involves consuming a gallon of water with live aquatic creatures and letting them live in his stomach before regurgitating them, still alive.

According to Blaine, no other person on Earth knows the secret to every one of his tricks. This makes it easier to deal with any surprises if, as he said, anything does go wrong during a show; no one will know if he has to change a trick on the fly.

“There’s no direction for it because a trick doesn’t have an exact beginning, middle and end … it is always alive and it is always different,” he said.

The seemingly inexplicable stunts that Blaine performs onstage may seem to audience members to be almost supernatural. However, Blaine said that while he believes in a higher power, he doesn’t necessarily think there are any paranormal elements to the magic he performs.

“I do believe in God and I do believe in a force that’s greater than ourselves, but at the same time, magic is very simple – it’s just practice, training, failing, and rehearsal, combined with psychology and intuition,” he said.

Blaine doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility of paranormal forces at work in everyday life, though. He has had bizarre recurring experiences, such as thinking of someone he hasn’t talked to for 20 years and then, shortly after, receiving a phone call from that same person.

“To me, that’s not just coincidental because it happens too often, so I think there is a part of brain waves that we don’t understand,” Blaine said. However, he pointed out that a few hundred years ago, technology like telephones and satellites would have seemed like magic, so perhaps elements of our world that seem magical are really just science that has yet to be explained.

Attendees at Blaine’s show will get a chance to see a different view of the magician than they have seen on TV.

“On stage, you kind of see the characteristics that are not filtered out or edited out … you get a glimpse more into the personality,” he said.

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